Kindle Fire – Support Part 1 – Device Logs

I have a Kindle fire in my car that reads during my commute. My wife has the same model Kindle fire, in purple, in her car that reads to her when she drives around town. For the last few months it’s made me sad face with a few errors. In the last few weeks it’s been making me more sad face with more errors, and it’s started to make my wife sad face coping the errors I’ve seen. Over the last month I’ve fully factory reset my device, tried to use it with an SD card, or without an SD card, updated to a newer more faster SD card, changed the format of my audio books from max level to minimal level, and yelled at the device in English and jibberish; nothing has helped. The annoyance level finally made it to the point where I opened a ticket to amazon support. My current list of issues on the ticket are:

When I turn my car off it effectively severs the Bluetooth connection between my car radio and my Kindle stopping my book from playing. When I come back to the device an hour or more later my device errors with “Unable to play | An error occurred. Internal player error” then the fire kicks me back to the home screen. I have to open audible again, then find my book. There are zero applications on my Kindle Fire not preloaded on it, it’s only purpose in life is to read to me.
When I am done with a book and I’ve added it to my book diary I delete the book from my device. The next day the bloody book is bad in my downloaded list. No matter how many times I delete the bloody book it comes back. – it always comes back to haunt me.
After the error in 1. I open audible and find the book again then click play and the book is running at 1x speed, while displaying 3x speed. I have to select the speed and click on 2.5x then 3x before it will play at 3x again.

Support Experience

In the past dealing with Amazon support has been an amazing thing. Example, I’d contact Amazon for a shipping issue and before I finished my sentence the agent would come back telling they reshipped the last 19 items and ask if I was happy. – might be exaggerating here, but support felt this awesome! For this issue I’ve actually sent the words “ are you really ignoring me and telling me to fuck off” – or – “Really 5 days into the support case you need me to verify my identity? Is this another method to tell me to fuck off and stop talking to you?” – or – “PLEASE NEVER RESPOND TO ME AGAIN WITHOUT CUT AND PASTE or a TEMPLATE, and ACTUALLY READ MY WORDS ALL OF THEM before responding to me”

The few people who have responded to keep telling me the only way to support me is to call me. I tell them I don’t like the phone and see no purpose in being on the phone until they have read all of the date I’ve sent them, and they write to me not using a template what they think my issue is. I have yet to get an acceptable or helpful response to my request. I’m either dealing with complete idiots who cannot read, a bot looking for keywords replying with templates based on key words in my questions, or they are trying to piss me off. Not sure which one; either way Amazon support makes me feel like I’m dealing with Comcast right now. We’ve made No progress yet resolving my issue – will update that in another post

Obtain debug logs

During the course of trouble shooting I asked Amazon support how to read log files on my device. They nailed this one and explained to me how to obtain logs. I sent amazon the logs then never heard a word about the logs again; Le sigh. To obtain the log files on your Kindle file, use follow the steps:

Tap the magnifying glass icon from the Home screen of your Fire tablet.
Type “;dm” (without quotation marks) into the search field.
Tap GO, and then wait 60 seconds. A message will pop up at the bottom of the screen: “Crash Offload Started.” After the log files are downloaded to the device, another message will appear: “Crash Offload Finished.”
Connect your Fire tablet to your computer. When your Fire tablet is plugged into your computer, it appears as a removable mass storage device browse to the \KindleLogs folder and obtain your logs.

The log file looks something like this – tmp_logs_G000H404543101SH_2016-05-19.215536.379.tmp – opening the file in a hexeditor the first line is – 50 4B 03 04 14 00 08 08 08 00 F2 AE B3 48 00 // PKò®³H – 50 4b / PK = means compressed file to me. I tried to open with windows ZIP but it failed. Then figuring fire is based on android, and android is based on Linux, I bet the file is a TAR zip formatted file. I Fired up 7zip and opened the file no problem. The result was the same file? Opened the same file again in 7zip, and, BAM there are the log files. Not sure why it’s compressed twice, but I was able to find the log files.

The logs look to be mostly PII scrubbed. Did not see any content titles or my name in the logs I was able to find. The only bit in the logs that did anything for me was the following entertaining error. – sigh wish they helped me trouble shoot my own issue but they did not.

05-17 10:00:22.676 13782 16575 E ContentSyncFramework: WTF? Some horrible error occurred when trying to run provider: *****